The actor Michael B. Jordan, flash in a gray-and-black Calvin Klein tuxedo and Christian Louboutin loafers, stood posing on the red carpet at the Gotham Independent Film Awards and felt one thing: “Growth,” he said. “One of those weird steppingstones that you’ve got to go through as an actor.”

“I remember getting whisked by these carpets,” he explained at the awards on Monday night, recalling earlier moments in the limelight when a photographer might snap one shot and move on. “ ‘Nobody else is taking pictures?’ O.K., cool.”

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Press and attendees at the Gotham Independent Film Awards.Credit
Michael Nagle for The New York Times

Mr. Jordan, familiar to fans of “Friday Night Lights” and “The Wire,” made the leap this year to big-screen leading man, as the star of the indie drama “Fruitvale Station.” Based on the life of Oscar Grant III, an unarmed 22-year-old who was shot and killed by a transit officer in Oakland, Calif., in 2009, it was a festival darling, earning grand jury and audience awards at Sundance and a prize for best first film at Cannes.

This week, Mr. Jordan and the film’s director, Ryan Coogler, just two years out of film school, picked up a few more prizes, at the Gothams and from the New York Film Critics Circle and National Board of Review. With the Weinstein Company promoting and distributing the film, they are most likely on the path to the Academy Awards, to be handed out March 2.

“Fruitvale Station” is just one of an unusually large field of candidates this year, spanning conventional highbrow studio fare, up-from-the-bootstraps indies, star-driven blockbusters, historical epics, romances and more. There are nearly two dozen movies vying for a shot at a best picture Oscar, each with a legitimate chance at it. Completists may rejoice, or despair: Many of this year’s movies are dark, tension-filled odysseys.

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From left, Michael B. Jordan and Forest Whitaker at the Gotham Independent Film Awards.Credit
Michael Nagle for The New York Times

Ready? Deep breath. The front-runner may be “12 Years a Slave,” Steve McQueen’s searing drama, based on a historical account of the antebellum South. “Gravity,” Alfonso Cuarón’s taut space thriller, is already a $615 million blockbuster and redefined the visual art of cinema. Then there are two late but much talked about entries to the race: Martin Scorsese’s “Wolf of Wall Street,” his longest movie ever, about financial shenanigans in the 1980s and ’90s, and David O. Russell’s deliciously ’70s “American Hustle,” which reunites him with the Oscar-winning stars of “Silver Linings Playbook” and “The Fighter.” Set in the near future, Spike Jonze’s “Her,” about a man who falls in love with his computer operating system, received best picture and director honors from the National Board of Review on Wednesday, and has had such a rapturous reception that there is trophy talk for Scarlett Johansson, whose entire performance is voice only.

The Weinstein Company, an Oscar expert, will also be touting “Lee Daniels’ The Butler,” a portrait of the civil rights movement through one man’s eyes, and “August: Osage County,” the adaptation of Tracy Letts’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, with Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts as a warring Southern mother and daughter worthy of Flannery O’Connor. (The company is cannily rereleasing “The Butler” in theaters on Friday.) Also circulating in the best picture pool are austere dramas like “All Is Lost,” starring Robert Redford in one of the most noteworthy, and silent, performances of his career, and “Captain Phillips,” with an at-sea Tom Hanks facing Somali pirates. “Nebraska,” from Oscar winner Alexander Payne, a black-and-white look at an elderly man’s last wish, won Bruce Dern a best actor award at Cannes. “Inside Llewyn Davis,” about a struggling musician in the 1960s folk scene in New York, earned the Coen brothers the Grand Prix there. “Out of the Furnace,” with an Oscar-ready cast in Christian Bale, Casey Affleck and Woody Harrelson, and “Lone Survivor,” based on the true story of a Navy SEAL unit in Afghanistan, tackle endurance and American manhood. So does “Prisoners,” a missing-child detective story with Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal and Melissa Leo.

“Philomena,” starring Judi Dench, and Woody Allen’s “Blue Jasmine,” with Cate Blanchett in a star turn, present women with deep secrets. “Before Midnight,” the third part in the Richard Linklater-Ethan Hawke-Julie Delpy series, showcases a couple with few secrets but a wealth of on-screen history.

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The actresses, from left, Kathryn Hahn, Amy Poehler and Rashida Jones were among the Gotham awards attendees.Credit
Michael Nagle for The New York Times

In this distinctly bleak year, movies like “Dallas Buyers Club,” about AIDS patients, and “Rush,” about dangerous auto racing, pass for feel-good offerings. Lighter fare includes “Saving Mr. Banks,” about the development of “Mary Poppins,” with Mr. Hanks as a mustachioed Walt Disney and Emma Thompson as the biting Australian-born creator of the memorable nanny. “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” Ben Stiller’s adaptation of the James Thurber short story, could prove an audience pleaser this winter.

The Academy allows five to 10 best pictures nominees, although for mathematical reasons related to the way the preferential ballot is counted, it’s unlikely that voters will actually anoint the maximum.

Still, it doesn’t hurt to try, and a network of awards consultants and statuette soothsayers are paid to help movies make the cut. For the fifth year, I will be monitoring their efforts daily, parsing the campaign narratives and backlashes in my role as the Carpetbagger columnist.

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Lupita Nyong’o, from “12 Years a Slave,” at the Gothams.Credit
Michael Nagle for The New York Times

For new hopefuls and even veteran stars, it’s a dizzying circuit of meet-and-greet luncheons, Q. and A.’s, lesser awards ceremonies and parties where they are meant to be erudite yet humble, charismatic individuals yet team players, in a bid to appeal to Academy voters.

“It’s all a bit mad,” said Ralph Fiennes, a past nominee for “The English Patient” and “Schindler’s List” and the director and star of this year’s “Invisible Woman.”

“When you take a job on, you do it because it’s a great part, great director, great script,” he said. “It’s work that you hope will be fulfilling for yourself, but also it’s the connection with other people that you make.” And then the awards shuffle happens. “You don’t go into for that reason,” he said, but “there’s a little bit of you that goes, ‘Oh, might it be me?’ Your ego gets frauded in ways that aren’t always maybe very healthy.”

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Kevin Pearce, snowboarder and documentary subject, at the Gothams.Credit
Michael Nagle for The New York Times

Notoriously dedicated performers like Mr. Bale, who won an Oscar for “The Fighter” and is now on deck in “Out of the Furnace” and “American Hustle,” take a gimlet-eyed view of the whole thing. “I’m human,” he said. “I love it when other human beings give me a pat on the back and say they appreciate my work. That being said, look, it’s kind of a funny thing to think that there could be an absolute best actor. It’s not like this is a 100-meter-dash where you cross a line first. It’s all opinion, you know?”

For a filmmaker like Nicole Holofcener, who built a career on well-regarded low-budget indies like “Walking and Talking” and “Please Give,” and moved up to studio leagues this year as the writer-director of “Enough Said,” a nomination would be a door-opener. “Some people would be hearing about me for the first time,” she said, “which would be great in the movie business — maybe think of me for a great script that they need a director for or a great book they need a writer for.”

Ms. Holofcener isn’t sure her movie, a critically lauded romantic comedy with Julia Louis-Dreyfus and James Gandolfini, has a shot. But Gandolfini’s performance, among his last on film, is endearing, and in his absence, she and Ms. Louis-Dreyfus will be promoting it, on red carpet after red carpet, in gown after gown, with one-liner after one-liner.